What is a Professional Hustler?

If you have read enough about me, you will know that I like to call myself a Professional Hustler. Most people love the phrase. Some don’t.

This little writeup is for the 2% of you who have told me that “Professional Hustler” sounds awkward or scary.

For the last 10+ years, I have worked almost exclusively in a startup environment. I learned to juggle eleventy billion different tasks, anything from administrative assistant work, legal matters, communications on behalf of a growing brand, invoicing, selling products (advertisements, services), drafting proposals, creating presentations, heading up business development, brokering partnerships, managing a support queue, managing a support team, training staff, editing content, writing content, managing technical infrastructures, dealing with budgets, handling operations, delegating tasks, interviewing employees, interviewing people on behalf of the media, responding to RFPs… I could keep on going.

Anyone who knows a bit about the startup world knows that the appropriate word for getting things done (efficiently and effectively) is to hustle. People say it all the time, especially when they are embedded in the throes of startups where they are wearing many hats and doing it all.

I take hustling to the extreme. I go to bed every single night with nothing else to do, living in an Inbox Zero world. I manage my time efficiently despite doing everything. And I love it.

Let’s talk about the hustle for a moment: I gave birth to my daughter on a Friday night. The next night, from my hospital bed, I closed a six figure deal for a brand I was working with at the time. Mind you, this all happened on Mother’s Day weekend. If that’s not hustle, I don’t know what is.

And I do it in a completely professional capacity. I would argue that I coined the phrase “professional hustler” because I never heard it before I used it (and the domain, which I totally should have bought, was purchased *after* I started calling myself one).

Now, if you don’t like the phrase “professional hustler,” I won’t fault you. However, I will argue that it defines me as a person and my work ethic, which is very important to me. If you don’t respect the hustle or the phrase used to represent that in a professional capacity, a phrase that has been used countless times in this modern era, we’re probably not going to get along. I take the phrase and the effort that revolves around being a hustler seriously, and you can think of the negative connotations that were more appropriate to think about in the stone age (but not the Internet era), but I’d like to see the world from a broader spectrum, one that encompasses what hustle means in the present day, not one that typically pays homage to a magazine that is older than I am.